What makes you think that? Sony has been doing it for years and Microsoft just started doing it. Both announced at E3 that with an online subscription (which will be required for almost all of the features you guys are talking about) you will receive special sales and regular discounts as well as free games every month. MS was gonna have to keep retailers happy before as well, they were selling DIGITAL VERSIONS in retail copies. You were never going to get competitive pricing, the new consoles are not PCs.
I think MS was only even including retail disc versions of their game to appease the people that would complain about having to download a 30gb game and pass on the console before they realized that they liked the convenience. I imagine through the first few years they would have pushed people more and more towards the digital versions of the games and away from the discs. Now we're stuck with discs being the primary method of distribution for another gen.
I think their idea was to push the digital versions, which you can also get on physical disk if you just have to have it. Now we're back to the disc version being the main version, and oh by the way you can get it digitally too.
But nothing changed on the digital front, wtf is the problem - everything on the digital front is the same. All new games will be released digitally on the day they are released, just as before. You can still migrate your account around and play on other peoples XBONEs just like before. You'll still likely be able to trade and sell digital copies as they haven't commented that they were changing that from their previous position.
All thats changed is that people that have poor internet connections, or travel or just want the freedom to be able to play a game when servers are down can now do so by buying the physical copy, and you can still wake up on release day, not get dressed, not get in your car and drive to the store and still download the game. Its the best of both worlds, nothing was lost.
I think you need to read what they've said first. You cannot play your disc based games without the disc, anywhere, home or at a friends house. You cannot trade, sell, or SHARE digital copies.
I did read what the press release, and every bit of official information released before then said... before they reversed their DRM decisions they were very clear that they were working internally on a way to trade and sell digital copies of games,
Microsoft would be taking a cut on the front and back end of all of those transactions. They didn't mention in the press release that they were no longer going forward with that, so why would you assume they would stop?
And for your former point, so? Before the disc literally didn't matter, you were buying the digital copy, on disc, to go home register and install it to your console where you could then play that game on your live account by migrating your account to other peoples XBONEs, if you wanted to play that game on another persons XBONE, you would have either had to migrate your account (if it was the digital version), or take the disc with you and then migrate your account.
Now if you go to a persons house and you wanna play a physical copy, you pick it up and take it with you. Now if you wanna play the digital copy, you migrate your account and play it on their XBONE.